Emergence Of Self Research Articles

Synthesizing the temporal self: robotic models of episodic and autobiographical memory.

Episodic memories are experienced as belonging to a self that persists in time. We review evidence concerning the nature of human episodic memory and of the sense of self and how these emerge during development, proposing that the younger child experiences a persistent self that supports a subjective experience of remembering. We then explore recent research in cognitive architectures for robotics that has investigated the possibility of forms of synthetic episodic and autobiographical memory. We show that recent advances in generative modeling can support an understanding of the emergence of self and of episodic memory, and that cognitive architectures which include a language capacity are showing progress towards the construction of a narrative self with autobiographical memory capabilities for robots. We conclude by considering the prospects for a more complete model of mental time travel in robotics and the implications of this modeling work for understanding human episodic memory and the self in time. This article is part of the theme issue 'Elements of episodic memory: lessons from 40 years of research'.

What’s the Emergency in Maternal Emergence? A Response to Hoskins-Murphy’s “Close to the Bone”

ABSTRACT In response to Nicola Hoskins-Murphy’s paper, I wonder about the limitations of and contradictions embedded in the formulation of a maternal that requires foreclosure of a longed-for emergence of self and endless sacrifice in service of meeting the child’s needs, and I offer a framework for a meta-examination of the structures – mythological, psychoanalytic, political, historical, and economic – that shape such maternal formulations. I examine the sense of threat that circulates in the paper around the desire for and fear of this “emergence” and wonder how a greater awareness of the social dimension the mothers and their sons are situated in might help shift its presence. I argue that there are unique new challenges to maternal subjectivity posed by children in later adolescence and in the transition to young adulthood which need further theorization in general, and suggest that feminist critical voices can support emergence that deviates from and coexists with nurturance of children, especially but not only in this developmental period.

Pangea – The Emergence of Self


 
 
 
 
 This is my story and my journey of the healing power of an arts-based child and youth care self-portrait assignment. My name is Jordan Grant, and I am about to enter my final year in the Bachelor of Child and Youth Care (CYC) program at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta. In my early life, I struggled to find self-acceptance and was unwilling to move into the vulnerable spaces of self-repair, as I felt overwhelmed by my perceived flaws and insecurity regarding my innate worth as a human being. The CYC program provided an uncomfortable yet safe place in which to overcome my self-doubt and experience personal growth. One third-year assignment was especially important in my personal development that I have decided to share this assignment with you.
 
 
 
 

Webavalia: Algorithm Improvement of an eAssessment Tool Based on a User Survey

There has been an increased use of workgroups during Problem-Based Learning (PBL) activities, which have implied the emergence of self and peer evaluation practices in education. In turn, these practices have highlighted the importance of e-assessment tools where the collection of feedback is regarded. The consideration of the students’ self and peer assessment about a project has influence on their individual mark. Literature states that e-assessment tools need to consider restrictions in the students’ distribution of scores during the self and peer assessment. An emerging technology that has recently started to be applied in the development of software tools is Machine Learning. This technology allows the possibility to implement algorithms that can process the students’ feedback about their marks, increasing the efficiency on the methodology implemented. This paper presents a framework that collects feedback of a survey and translates those results in parameter values that will dynamically change the distribution function of the final individuals’ mark. The advantages and restrictions of different solutions for the framework, based on the literature, are also discussed. Finally, there is the presentation of WEBAVALIA, a free software tool where the framework will be implemented, improving its usability, user experience, flexibility, and efficiency.

Motivation, Identity, and Emergence of Self: ESL Learners in Bridge Course at Aligarh Muslim University

The study aims at viewing the second language learners enrolled in the Bridge Course of English, at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). The Bridge Course is of a year’s duration and the objective is to prepare the learner with ‘institutionalised supplement education and wider employment avenues’. This is done with the aim to mainstream the ESL learners who have Urdu as their mother tongue and have learned Arabic as a foreign language in Madarsa. Their need to learn a second foreign language, which is the global English, has been explored from the perspective of motivation and identity. The study attempts to probe into the dimensions of identity and emergence of self among learners. It has been substantiated with quantitative and qualitative analysis by using SPSS version 17 software and one way ANOVA univariate test. The findings suggest that, compared to the learners’ having only instrumental motivation towards the target language, their possession of both integrative and instrumental motivation in line with their ideal self and ought-to self were invested more into the learning of target language.

Dynamic Interplay between Modes of Regulation During Motivationally Challenging Episodes in Collaboration

The cognitive and social demands of collaboration can raise significant motivation challenges. Task progression relies on team members strategically taking control of the problems and adapting accordingly. Theory indicates that productive collaboration involves groups using three modes of regulation: self-regulation, co-regulation, and socially shared regulation. Despite research demonstrating the occurrence of all three modes in collaboration, it is unclear how these modes interact and how co-regulation supports the emergence of self- and shared-regulation of motivation. The study aimed to examine the role co-regulation played in dynamically stimulating the emergence of self- and shared-regulation of motivation. A cross-case comparison was conducted between two groups who experienced high levels of motivation challenges but achieved contrasting perceptions of the overall team learning productivity. During analysis, groups’ dynamic regulatory processes within the online environment were visually represented using a tool called the Chronologically-ordered Representation for Tool-Related Activity (CORDTRA). Findings demonstrate that co-regulation of motivation may afford and thwart the emergence of self- and shared-regulation, and these processes interacted with the group’s situational challenges and the regulatory skills group members possessed. Comparisons between the two groups indicated that groups' motivation regulation should (a) match the demands of the challenges at hand, (b) be positively supported by group members through co-regulation, and (b) involve a more varied strategic responses so that the group may continue to learn and co-construct knowledge effectively as a team.

The Intimate Third: Toward a Theory of Coherence

The flow and cohesion of personal existing, the sense of self, is broken up by trauma. The survivor of repeated traumata is left with a deficiency of self involving a subtle disintegration of consciousness. This paper focuses on the way in which self may be fostered, building on the work of Robert Hobson. He proposed a relational means toward coherence of self. The relationship characteristic of traumatic consciousness must be transformed into the triadic relationship of “aloneness-togetherness.” Steps toward this condition resemble the emergence of self in childhood. Extracts from a therapeutic session illustrate this generative pathway. After an initial state of traumatic “adualism,” a conversation ensues which culminates in the emergence of self, the crucial forerunner of which is the creation of an “intimate third.” The third has a unifying function.

Conflict between Inner Freedom and Socially Constructed of Female Destiny in Toni Morrison’s Chosen Novels

The concept of ‘self’ is closely related to the idea of identity. Self is just what makes us who we are. In the modern context, emergence of self refers to freeing it from hierarchy and dependence. The self becomes responsible for itself, for maintaining its own image, which happens through social interactions. According to the psychologist, William James, self is essentially a social structure and it arises in social experiences. ‘Selfhood’ is formed from experiences. It changes not only over a period, but also emerges as what we experience as the ‘self’ in a particular period. Human beings have the unique quality of reflecting upon and evaluating their thoughts, feelings and actions. By understanding oneself, one can hope to achieve greater happiness, satisfaction, fulfillment, liberation and also foster better relations with people around. Selfhood is important to us, both as individuals and as social creatures, as it shapes our personal existence and our relations with those whom we bond.

Pilgrim and path: the emergence of self and world on a walking pilgrimage in Ireland

This article foregrounds the pilgrim, as a relational identity, to explore the co-emergence of self and world through embodied spatial practices. The pilgrim, as a liminal and mobile figure, is aligned with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological concept of the ‘flesh’, which presents subject and object as co-incipient. An auto-ethnographic study of the Croagh Patrick pilgrimage in the west of Ireland combines interview accounts from research participants and my own fieldwork experiences. This journey into the performative and liminal aspects of pilgrimages examines of how pilgrim and path emerge in an intermeshing of body and landscape, the spiritual and material and culture and praxis. In mobilising the figure of the pilgrim, this article contributes to disciplinary discussions concerning phenomenology/post-phenomenology, while highlighting the significance of pilgrimage as a purposeful performance.

Identity Narrative and Its Role in Biological Survival: Implications for Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy

ABSTRACTIn this article, we propose the term identity narrative (IdN) to define an implicit emotional and cognitive framework that serves as an unconscious scaffolding for the gradual development of autobiographical memory. We distinguish preverbal IdN from narrative identity, a term previously used in the philosophical literature. Unlike narrative identity, which refers to conscious life scripts, IdN is unconscious and constitutes a contemporary neuropsychological conceptualization of the unconscious. Within autobiographical memory, IdN has a stabilizing function providing individual predictability and, hence, social stability. IdN begins prior to language acquisition and has an evolutionary significance. It is consolidated by neurohormonal mechanisms, influences and is influenced by attachment, and molds the manner in which autobiographical memory is recalled. It participates in the emergence of self and identity. IdN is reshaped throughout life by both bottom-up (implicit “predictive cycle” paradigm) and top-down acquisitions that include paradigm shift/sudden new insights, experiences with high emotional valence, repetition and practicing, and prolonged exposure. In this way, IdN, autobiographical memory, and the language brain are parts of a larger biological substrate of human social affiliations.

Approaching Hysteria and Abjection through Freudian Reading of Toni Morrison’s Paradise

This paper examines the representation of hysteria in Toni Morrison’s Paradise. The study will mainly focus on the psychological traits of the female protagonists. Such traits provide amble instance of the influence of hysteria on the protagonists’ conscious behavior. For this reason, the primary conceptual formwork will be psychoanalysis. Accordingly, Sigmund Freud’s concept of hysteria will be applied to interpret the hysteric symptoms which result from harmful sexual experiences like rape, molestation and violation in a male dominated society. In this regard, the protagonist’s suffering from hysteric symptoms, like fear, silence, nightmare, and many other symptoms are going to be scrutinized in order to identify the influence of hysteria on the protagonist’s reaction. Freud asserts that sexual experience or molestation that occur within childhood is the main source of hysteria which appear later. Thus, this paper will illustrate the causes that lead the protagonist to be hysteric from Freudian perspective and emergence of self- actualization to gain subjectivity and independence.

Working Through Countertransference: Navigating Between Safety and Paranoia for a Client With Complex Trauma History and Borderline Personality Organization

ABSTRACTThe aftermath of complex trauma deeply impacts one's self-organization and interpersonal relationships, often resulting in clients who present to therapy with borderline characteristics and are typically labeled as difficult to treat. Further clinical complications with paranoid features may quickly place the therapist at a loss with respect to managing perceived and/or actual threats to client safety. Using psychodynamic theories, especially Kleinian understandings of psychosis and Winnicottian approaches to early disturbance and its impact on the emergence of self, this article provides a detailed case illustration that explores how a critical reflection of countertransference as “enactment,” “communication,” and “imagination” can help the therapist to understand the client's unconscious symbolic psychic struggles and to guide treatment selections in the therapy process.

I in an other\u2019s eye

This paper presents a model of how the fundamental cognitive machinery of self emerges as an accident of sociality, reflecting Buber’s assertion of the primacy of I–Thou relationships. This stands in contrast with the standard ‘I first’ model of theory of mind, which suggests that we understand others’ thought processes by imagining ourselves in their heads. However, this standard model tacitly assumes that understanding oneself is in some way easy, counter to experience in knowledge elicitation, where experts find it hard to reflect on and externalise tacit thought processes. Furthermore, it is hard to create convincing evolutionary accounts for the spontaneous emergence of self. The paper argues that the reflexive understanding of self is both more plausible phylogenically as an evolutionary development and fully consonant ontogenically with research on childhood cognitive development. This reflexive understanding has practical implications for efforts to create artificial agents or robots that are in some sense conscious, and may also inform discussions of the ethical and spiritual implications of advances in artificial intelligence.

The role of self-other distinction in understanding others' mental and emotional states: neurocognitive mechanisms in children and adults.

Social interactions come with the fundamental problem of trying to understand others' mental and affective states while under the overpowering influence of one's own concurrent thoughts and feelings. The ability to distinguish between simultaneous representations of others' current experiences as well as our own is crucial to navigate our complex social environments successfully. The developmental building blocks of this ability and how this is given rise to by functional and structural brain development remains poorly understood. In this review, I outline some of the key findings on the role of self-other distinction in understanding others' mental as well as emotional states in children and adults. I will begin by clarifying the crucial role for self-other distinction in avoiding egocentric attributions of one's own cognitive as well as affective states to others in adults and outline the underlying neural circuitry in overcoming such egocentricity. This will provide the basis for a discussion of the emergence of self-other distinction in early childhood as well as developmental changes therein throughout childhood and into adulthood. I will demonstrate that self-other distinction of cognitive and emotional states is already dissociable early in development. Concomitantly, I will show that processes of self-other distinction in cognitive and affective domains rely on adjacent but distinct neural circuitry each with unique connectivity profiles, presumably related to the nature of the distinction that needs to be made.

The child who was left behind: ‘Dynamic temporality’ and interpretations of history in transnational adoption

This article draws on psychological theory relating to the emergence of self and subjectivity to examine transnational adoptee experiences of their own circulation as children. The article juxtaposes state policies and adoptive parent discourses that standardize adoption as a unidirectional process that requires a clean break from the past, and more complex renditions by the adopted themselves of subjectivity as a temporally dynamic and open-ended process of coming into being. Drawing on narratives of return by adoptees born in Ethiopia, India, and Korea who were adopted by parents in Sweden and the United States, the article suggests that their experiences in the orphanages, hospitals, and families from which they were adopted complicate understandings of what it means to circulate, while opening up standardizing descriptions of family, childhood, and belonging.

Virtual Selves, Real Relationships: An Exploration of the Context and Role for Social Interactions in the Emergence of Self in Virtual Environments

With the evolution of computer-mediated communication and the arrival of new virtual environments, there are potential implications for how the Self may be conceptualised. This paper considers these implications by examining the continuities and discontinuities between the Self in virtual and non-virtual environments, and contemporary and historical settings. Symbolic Interaction and Activity Theory approaches emphasise the Self as emerging in context, through Self-Other and Self-environment interactions in the minutiae of everyday life, but to some extent foreground physical rather than virtual interactions. Interactions in virtual environments are characterised by specific forms of embodiment and the experience of "presence", with avatars providing embodiment for interaction separate from the physical world and interaction with others being one of the determinants of presence. The complexion of Self-Other interactions in virtual environments is circumscribed by the characteristics of communications and relationships that occur in them, which are constrained by reduced social cues but overcome through the invention of techniques driven by the desire to socially interact. This paper highlights the role of symbolic mediation in the emergence of Self in virtual environments and posits that, while emergence of Self is interactive in nature, virtual environments are particular sites for a Self where the specific role of social interaction must be foregrounded.

The Autism Psychodynamic Evaluation of Changes (APEC) scale: A reliability and validity study on a newly developed standardized psychodynamic assessment for youth with Pervasive Developmental Disorders

The present study was designed to examine the reliability and validity of the Autism Psychodynamic Evaluation of Changes (APEC) scale, developed to assess the evolution in individuals with autism under treatment. The APEC scale focuses on the key role of impairment in body image construction, which requires cross-modal sensory integration through emotional communication with motor representations. Thus, the body image construction is associated simultaneously with spatial and temporal organization and allows the emergence of self- and others-representations. The use of the APEC scale, with its seven domains (expression of emotion in relationships, eye contact, body image, graphic productions, exploration of space and objects, time perception, and verbal language), underlines the importance in autistic disorder of anxieties related to body and spatial representations, and of impairment in the body ego construction which is closely linked to the emergence of individuation/separation processes. This study was conducted on 73 children and adolescents with autistic disorder. They were recruited in day care facilities where two caregivers independently gave their ratings based on their clinical observation on a daily basis during the same month. Analyses included assessing construct validity through correspondence analyses and inter-rater reliability using kappa coefficients. The APEC scale offers a reliable and validated psychodynamic assessment of interest for professionals (such as child psychiatrists, caregivers, therapists or teachers) and researchers working with children, adolescents and adults with autistic disorder, especially in the follow-up of their evolution. The APEC scale provides an approach at the interface of psychoanalysis and neuroscience, and is also of interest for clinical and developmental psychology. Using the APEC scale in a range of different practical and research settings will foster links between psychoanalytic perspectives and educational training for children with autistic disorder, and will contribute to the dialogue between psychoanalysis, neuroscience and psychology.

Recognition and the Duality of Self

Recognition is a fundamental element of that form of therapeutic conversation necessary to the generation and re-generation of selfhood, self being defined here as James did (i.e., as a dynamic process in which a “doubling” can be abstractly discerned, consisting of a “knower” and “known”). We suggest that this doubleness, achieved in maturity, has its first form not as an intrapsychic experience but in the world, the second part being provided by the caregiver behaving in a characteristic way. Recognition is a word that only approximates the nature of this form of responsiveness, evoking a particular positive feeling out of which arises the sense of value. The philosophical background to the role of recognition in the emergence of self is briefly considered. The myth of Narcissus is used to illustrate the idea that lack of suitable recognition, inevitably involving a loss of value, leads to fruitless and maladaptive searches for the feeling of value at the core of self. El reconocimiento es un elemento f...

Dialogical Self in action: The emergence of Self—Positions among complex emotional and cultural dimensions

The Dialogical Self Theory model represents a fruitful perspective to make sense of self development within a dynamic perspective. Thanks to the inspiring ideas of Bakhtin and William James, the theoretical elaborations by Hermans of a dialogical self (DS) stands out as a promising approach to investigate the co-construction processes of self construction and development. Based on Hermans' ideas, we conceive the DS as a complex system where multiple I-positions engage in permanent dialogues along ontogeny. Here we present a theoretical contribution highlighting the major role played by complex and interacting sociocultural factors—diverse cultural practices and beliefs—and affect-laden experiences in self co-construction. The concept of values is particularly stressed as an organizing field (Valsiner, 2007) for self-development. The argument is illustrated with the narrative of a homosexual 25 years-old woman who struggled with different, and apparently contradictory, I-positions. Strong Catholic and family values interact with her homosexual experiences, and such internal dialogues, in interaction with her lived-through experiences within specific sociocultural contexts, give rise to a significant Missionary I-position within the gay community.

As It Was in the Beginning: Death and Re-membrance and the Christian Intuition

The author argues that the psyche crafts an affective metaphor for death out of the separation drama of infancy. Emergence of self from the mother–infant dyad can accomplish cohesion of fragmentary unconscious mentation strong enough, following Winnicott, to make possible a belief in God. Through developmental synergy between female and male elements, a sense of participation in an eternal principle of being can be achieved, sustaining the ego against anxieties over disintegration, and death as its analog. Myths of the child god illuminate the equation of fragmentation with death of self. Christianity expresses how the cohered self can transcend fragmentation.